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Monday, April 29, 2013

Another quilt pattern in a magazine! Fun fun! This one is the Beach Umbrellas quilt and it is in the March/April 2013 edition of Australian Quilter's Companion.

It's so fun to see this quilt in print!

If you don't live in Australia, and don't have a subscription, I have discovered it can be tough to get a hard copy of this magazine! However, it is on zinio.com in digital form for a very reasonable price! :)

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Here is a quilt I made last month. This was another one made on a whim. I have a whole list of quilts that I want to make, but somehow I keep coming up with these random crazy ideas for other quilts that I have to make RIGHT NOW. So I make them. The rest can wait. :)

This one was not even a glimmer in my little eye until the end of February when I got a letter from my old neighbors charity foundation in MN. It was an invite to their annual fish fry. The event was started by my neighbor in memory of her late husband and the money raised provides scholarships for students to a local high school. The fish fry is really fun and they have all these great bucket raffles and yummy food, but since we no longer live there, we would not be attending. I was able to donate a quilt for the raffle last year (this quilt) but since I had forgotten all about it this year, I had nothing! I love my cute neighbor Teresa so I really wanted to do another quilt. I had about 2 weeks to whip something up in time to ship it back to Minnesota.

I decided I wanted to do something black and white. Believe it or not, I have never made a black and white quilt before. This is my first! But I've been collecting fabrics here and there, so it was fun to go through them all and pick out my favorites. And originally I was thinking I wanted to use my wedge ruler somehow since I hadn't used that for a couple years...so I dorked around with that idea for a while, but wasn't happy with anything I came up with. Then I remembered that this quilt had to be done fast. So one night while helping my girls clean their room before bed, I saw this doll quilt I had made a couple years ago:

I liked the random wedges and I knew it would be fast, so I mocked it up (in inkscape) in black and white and threw in a couple of colored circles to mix it up. I messed around with the colors of the circles a lot and didn't actually decide on the 3 shades of aqua until I was ready to applique the circles on.

This was another one where I printed out the mock up and then had to measure everything and then increase the scale so I knew how big to cut everything. That part always takes a bit of extra time and is not always perfect, but it was fast to sew together. Seems like I spent a lot of time saying, "good enough"! ;) The circles were appliqued on using fusible web. Easy.

For the quilting I decided to do this randomly spaced diagonal line thing that turned out actually looking like a zigzag going up and down the quilt...that was a happy accident and I really like the way it turned out. I just stitched around the colored circles and then inside all the wedges I quilted a bunch of circles with my circle groovy board.

I bound this in solid black and for the back...no picture, but I pieced together the remnants of a cute charcoal gray dot sheet from Target that I used to make PJ's for my little sisters for Christmas. I had nothing else that was even close to matching and my inner thrifty girl would not allow the purchase of a quilt back. Hence, another quilt made entirely out of fabrics from my stash! Yay! And once this was done I decided it looked like one of those old wood ball mazes. But pretend you don't notice that the balls won't actually fit through some parts of the maze...

And I am happy to report that after several months and a reprieve for some very good behavior, my husband has temporarily been re-hired as quilt holder for pictures. What a sport! You know he loves quilting just as much as I do! :) Yay for quilting!